I. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to multimedia streaming. More particularly, the present invention is directed to methods and systems for managing abnormal disconnects during a streaming media session.
II. Description of Related Art
Wireless communication systems are experiencing rapid advances in the services, products and features that are available to consumers using such communication systems. In this regard, cellular/mobile phones have evolved into mobile devices that provide a rich feature set to consumers, such as Internet access, data network access, the ability to take and send pictures and video, text messaging capabilities, and the ability to playback multimedia content (e.g., music, video), among numerous other features. In fact, such mobile devices may, or may not, include mobile telephone capabilities.
Playing multimedia content on such mobile devices is quickly becoming more and more common. Such playback may be accomplished in various manners. One approach to playing back multimedia content (which may be termed “multimedia clips” or “clips”) is to download a clip from a content server (e.g., a computing device, which contains one or more clips) to the mobile device, such as using hypertext transfer protocol (http) based data communication. Once the clip is downloaded to the device, it is then typically played using a media player client installed on the mobile device. For small media clips this may be readily easy to accomplish.
However, for large clips (such as, for example, a feature length movie) downloading clips may not be practical due to the memory capacity and processing capabilities of current mobile devices. In such situations, multimedia clips may be streamed to the mobile device. It will be appreciated, of course, that any size media clip may be streamed. Various techniques (e.g., streaming protocols) for streaming are known to those working in this area. For example, the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RFC 2326, Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet Draft draft-ietf-mmusic-rfc2326bis-04) may be used.
Such streaming of a multimedia clip typically reduces the amount of memory capacity, as opposed to downloading an entire clip before it is played. Such reductions are realized because the multimedia content is communicated to the mobile device continuously (as a stream) and once a portion of the stream is played by the mobile device, it may be discarded.
However, current approaches for streaming multimedia content have certain drawbacks. For example, a wireless connection (over which multimedia clips are streamed) between the mobile device and a data network included in a communication system with which the mobile device is connected may be terminated for any number of reasons (e.g. loss of coverage, signal fade, communication error, etc.). If the wireless connection is terminated during the streaming of a clip, the streaming of that clip will also be terminated.
After the wireless connection is reestablished between the mobile device and the data network, using current approaches, a user of the mobile device must restart streaming of the interrupted clip from the beginning of the clip. For relatively short clips, this may not be too much of an inconvenience for a user, as replaying the clip from the beginning is not overly time consuming. However, for longer clips, restarting the clip from the beginning is both inconvenient and inefficient. Such an approach is time inefficient for the user and resource inefficient for the network resources due the need to re-stream the portion of the clip that was streamed prior to the termination of the wireless connection. Based on the foregoing, alternative approaches for streaming multimedia content are desirable.